Nastaran and Talis
The sea overspread
Forests and fields — deep-drowned land
Lost souls wander there.
After the first Cataclysm, the sinking of Shavarash, Kirian saw the many souls who wandered the Dragomir, unable to find rest. He called his newest servant Nastaran, a Dreamwalker, to help those lost souls find their way.
Nastaran was a woman of Ryndaria who had suffered many things in order to ascend to Aldael. Her adopted realm and her original homeland had been hard hit by the Cataclysm, and she agreed for the love she bore for those she had left behind.
Her work had a price: each memory the lost souls shared with her in the Dragomir made it more difficult for her to remember her own. She was losing her self.
As she walked through the chaos of the dreaming world's broken memories, Nastaran found a place where the Dragomir had settled into its new nature - where the bones of ancient trees stripped bare by salt water gleamed dimly beneath wavering starlight in the depths of the new-formed sea. And there she met a Shavarashan, one of the few to survive his country's destruction.
His name was Talis, and he, too, was a Dreamwalker. Sunk in his sorrows, he had fled to the dreaming world, but it had brought him no solace.
Nastaran met with him often as they walked the Dragomir each night - she showing lost souls the way home, he bringing the dreaming world into its present truth, so that it no longer showed him memories of Shavarash that once was.
But one night Nastaran finished her work in the region, and asked him to join her in the daylit hours. He did not reply, and, stricken, she fled.
The brink of despair
Is edged by slow-healing wounds
What price the abyss?
Nastaran spent many months wandering, freeing lost souls, forgetting herself, until one night she was found by one of the Lost.
She looked at him with his terrible void-dark eyes, his fluttering gills and rows of teeth and tail in place of legs, and something in her recognized the unrecognizable. It was Talis. He had become Lost.
Seeing his memories brought back her own remembrances. For a season she met with the Lost one more often than not in the dreaming world. As he lingered, her pain grew, for she had caused him to lose all that he was. As she lingered, she lost more of her self, for she had more souls' memories than she could remember, and they eclipsed her own.
At last, she shared with him her own fractured memories of their time together. Sharing settled her, and gave the Lost one desire for the humanity he had cast aside, for her desire had been the same as his: to walk in the same realm together, to live out all his days beside her, to find each other even in the dreaming world. Desire is the beginning of the Way, and so it was for Talis.
His eyes were still dark, but no longer with the inhuman darkness of the deep. His skin was no longer coldly scaled, but warm human flesh. He had feet in place of fins, and his teeth were no longer row-on-row, sharklike.
They walk the Way together now, in dreaming and in waking. It is said that they still walk the earth, redeeming the Lost who desire to reclaim their lost humanity.
Pilgrims meet in dreams
Broken, but still enduring
Lost, found, remembered.
Summary
The main idea here is that the Lost are not lost forever - that they can regain their humanity, if they rediscover a desire for something outside of their elemental nature.
Historical Basis
This legend is actually a true story, but because it is widely believed that the Lost are unable to regain their humanity, it is regarded as apocryphal.
Spread
This is not a common legend in Ryndaria, though it is somewhat widely known in Aldael, mostly because that is where Nastaran and Talis eventually settled.
Variations & Mutation
Most people took out the most unbelievable element: that Kirian himself wrought Talis' change, after the one who was Lost desired again the humanity he had thrown away.
Date of Setting
Directly after the first Cataclysm.
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